pounds. The gun fired and the empty chair blew apart. The sound was loud. Not like in the movies. It’s not a little cough. Not a polite little spit. It’s like taking the Manhattan phone book and raising it way over your head and smashing it facedown on a desk with all your strength. Not a quiet sound. But quieter than it could be.
The four guys were frozen with shock. Shredded vinyl and dirty horsehair stuffing were floating in the air. Rutter was staring, motionless. Reacher hit him hard, left-handed in the stomach, and kicked his feet away and dumped him on the floor. Then he lined up the Steyr on the guy next to the shattered chair.
“Downstairs,” he said. “All of you. Right now, OK?”
Nobody moved. So Reacher counted out loud
Jodie had the faked photograph in her hand. She crouched and held it out to him. He blinked and focused on it. His mouth was working, just a ragged hole in his beard. Reacher ducked down and caught his left wrist. Dragged his hand up and took hold of the little finger.
“Questions,” he said. “And I’ll break a finger every time you lie to me.”
Rutter started struggling, using all his strength to twist up and away. Reacher hit him again, a solid blow to the gut, and he went back down.
“You know who we are?”
“No,” Rutter gasped.
“Where was this picture taken?”
“Secret camps,” Rutter gasped. “Vietnam.”
Reacher broke his little finger. He just wrenched it sideways and snapped the knuckle. Sideways is easier than bending it all the way back. Rutter shrieked in pain. Reacher took hold of the next finger. There was a gold ring on it.
“Where?”
“Bronx Zoo,” Rutter gasped.
“Who’s the boy?”
“Just some kid.”
“Who’s the man?”
“Friend,” Rutter gasped.
“How many times have you done it?”
“Fifteen, maybe,” Rutter said.
Reacher bent the ring finger sideways.
“That’s the truth,” Rutter screamed. “No more than fifteen, I promise. And I never did anything to you. I don’t even know you.”
“You know the Hobies?” Reacher asked. “Up in Brighton?”
He saw Rutter searching through a mental list, dazed. Then he saw him remember. Then he saw him struggling to comprehend how those pathetic old suckers could possibly have brought all this down on his head.
“You’re a disgusting piece of shit, right?”
Rutter was rolling his head from side to side in panic.
“Say it, Rutter,” Reacher yelled.
“I’m a piece of shit,” Rutter whimpered.
“Where’s your bank?”
“My bank?” Rutter repeated blankly.
“Your bank,” Reacher said.
Rutter hesitated. Reacher put some weight back on the ring finger.
“Ten blocks,” Rutter shrieked.
“Title deed for your truck?”
“In the drawer.”
Reacher nodded to Jodie. She stood up and went around behind the counter. Rattled open the drawers and came out with a sheaf of paperwork. She flicked through and nodded. “Registered in his name. Cost forty thousand bucks.”
Reacher switched his grip and caught Rutter by the neck. Bunched his shoulder and pushed hard until the web of his hand was forcing up under Rutter’s jaw.
“I’ll buy your truck for a dollar,” he said. “Just shake your head if you’ve got a problem with that, OK?”
Rutter was totally still. His eyes were popping under the force of Reacher’s grip on his throat.
“And then I’ll drive you to your bank,” he said. “In my new truck. You’ll take out eighteen thousand dollars in cash and I’ll give it back to the Hobies.”
“No,” Jodie called. “Nineteen-six-fifty. It was in a safe mutual. Call it six percent, for a year and a half compounded.”
“OK,” Reacher said. He increased the pressure. “Nineteen-six-fifty for the Hobies, and nineteen-six-fifty for us.”
Rutter’s eyes were searching Reacher’s face. Pleading. Not understanding.
“You cheated them,” Reacher said. “You told them you’d find out what happened to their boy. You didn’t do that. So now we’ll have to do it for them. So we need expense money.”
Rutter was turning blue in the face. His hands were clamped hard on Reacher’s wrist, desperately trying to ease the pressure.
“OK,” Reacher asked. “So that’s what we’re going to do. Just shake your head if you’ve got any kind of a problem with any part of it.”
Rutter was dragging hard on Reacher’s wrist, but his head stayed still.
“Think of it like a tax,” Reacher said. “A tax on cheating little pieces of shit.”
He jerked his hand away and stood up. Fifteen minutes later, he was in Rutter’s bank. Rutter was nursing his left hand in his pocket and signing a check with his right. Five minutes after that, Reacher had $39,300 cash zipped into the sports bag. Fifteen minutes after that, he left Rutter in the alley behind his store, with two dollar bills stuffed in his mouth, one for the silencer, and one for the truck. Five minutes after that, he was following Jodie’s Taurus up to the Hertz return at LaGuardia. Fifteen minutes after that, they were in the new Lincoln together, heading back to Manhattan.
11
EVENING FALLS IN Hanoi a full twelve hours earlier than in New York, so the sun which was still high as Reacher and Jodie left the Bronx had already slipped behind the highlands of northern Laos, two hundred miles away to the west of Noi Bai Airport. The sky was glowing orange and the long shadows of late afternoon were replaced by the sudden dull gloom of tropical dusk. The smells of the city and the jungle were masked under the reek of kerosene, and the noises of car horns and nighttime insects were blown away by the steady whine of jet engines idling.
A giant U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport was standing on the apron, a mile from the crowded passenger terminals, next to an unmarked hangar. The plane’s rear ramp was down, and its engines were running fast enough to power the interior lighting. Inside the unmarked hangar, too, lights were on. There were a hundred arc lights, slung high up under the corrugated metal roof, washing the cavernous space with their bright yellow glow.
The hangar was as large as a stadium, but it held nothing except seven caskets. Each one of them was six and a half feet long, made from ribbed aluminum polished to a high shine and shaped roughly like a coffin, which is
